Apple's AirPlay might be getting all the attention lately but it's hardly the first solution for wirelessly streaming media to the television. Far from it. In 2003, the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) formed with its first set of interoperable products hitting the market in 2004. Since then, the alliance has certified thousands of products supported by more than 245 member companies, 29 of whom are listed as "promoter members" including such heavyweights as Sony, Nokia, Samsung, Toshiba, Verizon, AT&T Lab, LG, Qualcomm, Cisco, Microsoft, Panasonic, Intel, HP, and Motorola. Pretty much everyone but Apple. Recently, HTC joined the DLNA ranks with the introduction of two smartphones -- the Desire Z and Desire HD -- and a tiny media streamer known as the HTC Media Link, HTC's first attempt to gain a foothold in the living room. Over the last week we've been testing the Desire Z (a Eurofied T-Mobile G2) with the Media Link, lazily streaming video, music, and images around the house using a myriad of sources and controllers from Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and Western Digital. How did it perform? Click through to find out.
HTC Media Link DLNA streamer review
Sponsored Links

Gallery: HTC Media Link | 32 Photos
Pros
- Incredibly small and portableWorks well with HTC's DLNA handsetsStreams like magic with compatible media
Cons
- Weak codec supportInconsisent performance with other DLNA devicesToo expensive
Hardware
One thing that we miss is a 3.5-mm jack to give us more control over the audio output. The Media Link is so portable that you're bound to pack it up and use it in situations where a decent amplifier isn't available -- like, say, in a conference room with a projector or connected to a hotel room TV. Situations ideally accompanied by a set of small but powerful portable travel speakers.
Setup
It's worth mentioning that HTC is developing a Media Link app that will help you quickly switch between the Media Link hotspot and your home network. It's headed to the HTC Hub but it wasn't yet available for download at the time of this review.
Streaming
In general, streaming content that the Media Link recognized (more on that later) stored on our HTC Desire Z worked most of the time -- we'd say about one in ten uses resulted in some kind of unexpected behavior. Foibles ranged from the wrong picture being displayed when selecting individual images from a photo album, volume controls not responding, unexpected delays or resets, and large videos unceremoniously quitting (and requiring a restart from the beginning) while trying to scrub forward or back. We were disappointed to discover the lack of album art support on streamed music and our inability to fast forward or rewind our streaming audio or video -- you can only skip to the next or previous items in the playlist. Other issues that frustrated the experience included the occasional WiFi dropouts, and our inability to ever get the Media Link to work with our home theater projector. Nothing to get too worked up over, mind you, because when it worked (which was most of the time) it was fantastic and dead simple to operate. And the fact that we could use the Desire Z to select compatible media from our Windows 7 laptop (Microsoft built DLNA support into the OS) and Mac running the Twonky Server (sold separately) was just icing on the cake. We even managed to sneak a Galaxy S in to share some photographs.
Unfortunately, not all DLNA devices are built the same. Like many alliances, vendors grow weary of debating the merits of their enhanced feature suggestions in hopes of gaining formal ratification in the published standard. As such, in time, it becomes difficult to know where the DLNA spec ends and the manufacturers' customizations begin. We were already baffled by the stated Media Link requirement for "a DLNA-compatible HTC phone" coming into the review. Was that tacit admission of incompatibilities or just an attempt to promote HTC's own products? After all, DLNA certified devices should play nice with eachother, right? Not always, as we discovered when testing with the very popular Galaxy S from Samsung and WD TV Live HD from Western Digital.
Galaxy S owners are already familiar with DLNA, or at least they should be since the AllShare player / server is one of the handset's primary features. Things looked promising in our early testing allowing us to stream photographs captured by the Galaxy S to the HTC Media Link when using the S or Desire Z as the controller. We started having difficulties, however, when we began to test audio streaming between the Galaxy S and Desire Z. Although we could stream audio fine from AllPlay direct from the Galaxy S to the Media Link, we could not initiate the stream from the Galaxy S when using the HTC Desire Z as the controller. When trying to browse media from the audio folder the Desire Z kicked back a curious error message saying "no photo or video files" could be found -- even though we were looking for audio. And yes, we had the AllPlay server configured to automatically accept all video, audio, and picture requests. We also ran into what seems to be a codec issue when trying to stream H.264 videos captured natively to a .MP4 container by the camera on the Galaxy S. Unsurprisingly, it also didn't work when using the Desire Z as the controller to launch the stream off the Galaxy S. We even transferred the Galaxy S video to the Desire Z and still couldn't get it to stream to the HTC Media Link even though it would play fine locally on the HTC handset.
Just for kicks, we decided to further test cross-platform DLNA compatibility between the Desire Z and a Western Digital WD TV Live HD we have sitting on our network. Again, while things generally worked, we had issues that manifested themselves by the WD box showing up as busy (even though it was idle) and therefore unable to accept a content stream from the Z. The most irritating issue, however, was watching the Desire Z connection drop immediately after initiating a stream to the WD box such that it could no longer control the content playing on the display.
By comparison, the WD TV Live HD successfully streamed every test file over DLNA, and at 1080p when available, and connected to our home theater projector.